The Future of the Monitor: Upcoming Releases

It's been a while since the last release, and it's time to look at the future of CVS Monitor.

As I'm sure you are all aware by now, things move fairly slowly in the CVS Monitor world. It does everything I need, and I fix what I can when I can, to keep as many of you happy as possible.

The current stable release is 0.6.3, which contains as many patches and fixes as it was possible to leverage in, without having to deal with a total overhaul.

I had hoped to move to a shorter timeframe for the stable series, but events have intervened. CVS Monitor is currently undergoing a total backend rewrite. This is going to change a few things, and it means that the next release is likely to be a full 0.7.0 increment, with significant new functionality. Currently, the monitor's guts are strewn on the floor, and only partially put back together. There will be no 0.6.4 stable release in this series.

It is expected that the bulk of this work is to be funded by Pearson Education, who are migrating to Perforce and wanted CVS Monitor ported to Perforce. The schedule for most of this is currently to occur in September, with a release expected in October(ish).

Yes folks, this means that their are new backends coming. In the 0.7.0 release, this means the addition of Perforce support. Following on from this, there are people ready and willing to add support for subversion, and it's svk derivative. This should also mean that we can finally get :ext support, and :local support turned back on.

More interestingly, it should mean that you can connect to multiple different flavours of repositories within the same installation of CVS Monitor, and get a similar view of the repository, regardless of type.

In other news, a major new caching component has been completed. This is used in 0.6.3 to cache annotation views and such. In the 0.7.0 timeframe, most of the backend will be ported to this caching layer, meaning that file views, file downloads, and a number of other features become possible.

So, in summary, a little patience please people. I haven't forgotten about you all, and there's some great changes coming. And if you know perl, and would like to chip in I'd love to hear from you.

Now is also probably a good time to spruik for donations. Any money donated to the project goes directly to funding dedicated developer hours working on CVS Monitor. And if you have any preference for where the time should be spent, I'm happy to put the effort in that direction. So come on guys! I know there's a lot of big companies getting a lot of value out of CVS Monitor. Let's see some kickbacks guys :)

The recommended and prefered donation size is $50. If only 1 person of the 10-20 who download CVS Monitor each day donated, we could really start to push this baby forwards.